NEW YORK | Am I Supposed to Want This?

I recently read a great book. In The Best Of Everything, Rona Jaffe’s best-selling 1958 coming of age novel, three women move to New York City in search of love, work, and well, the best of everything. Through their run-ins with the men who won’t propose and the bosses who won’t take them seriously, it reflected the unabashed promise the city offers when you’re a 20-year-old with little to no life experience. The time in your life when you’re nothing but a big open chasm, waiting to be filled. I related because when I was 20, I moved to New York for an internship.
I also wanted and still want … the best of everything.

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by Chandler LevackIllustration by Christopher Delorenzo

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Let me paint you a picture. It was the summer of 2007. I was an overweight virgin from Toronto, prone to wearing Woody Allen t-shirts and purple Hakim Optical frames. I’d only been to New York once for a four-day visit over reading week, accompanied by a Closeted Gay Roommate that I was in love with. We crashed on the Jersey City couch of my former film school classmate who was then a travel agent. (She has since moved on to create her own line of veggie burgers.)

New York had captured my imagination ever since I was a little kid, but more as a cultural concept than a place people actually lived in. It seemed like a haven for intellectuals and artists where the saxophone solo from Saturday Night Live was always playing in your heart. When me and the aforementioned CGR got out at the 110th/Cathedral Parkway 1 train stop, seeing the city for the first time was almost too much to handle. I couldn’t imagine living in a place where a pre-war building on Edgar Allen Poe Way and a man masturbating from inside a chicken costume both competed for your attention. For someone who had always wanted to live in a movie, New York was ideal. It’s a convenient fantasy for those with a limited scope of imagination.

My sweet friend Liz took us to Times Square, Greenwich Village, Magnolia Bakery. We saw Barefoot in the Park on Broadway, rode the carousel in Central Park, and drank a frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity 3. I spent the whole trip doubled over with anxiety, so consumed with how to confess my love to the CGR that I barely registered a thing. The last day we arrived at the Met an hour before it closed and ran through the exhibits hand in hand, ancient Egyptians and Andy Warhol paintings and suits of armor flying past us as if we were traveling back and forth through time. Standing in the sculpture garden, I dared myself over and over to kiss him.

“It seemed like a haven for intellectuals and artists where the saxophone solo from Saturday Night Live was always playing in your heart.”

So obviously, getting a re-do two years later during a summer internship at SPIN magazine (a publication I had been obsessed with since age 15) felt like such an incredible fluke. Four days before I was supposed to start work, my parents packed their Honda with my luggage and my dad drove me from Toronto towards the airport in Buffalo, New York. However, we were detained at the border. They took me aside and questioned me for three hours, took my fingerprints and eventually turned me back to Canada saying I didn’t have the proper visa. I wept loudly as my parents suggested that I should just forget about the internship. Two days later, I made my dad drive me through the border again as we told the guard we were day tripping to the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame. I got on a plane. In the cab heading to my Bushwick apartment, I was amazed by everything – the 24-hour Mexican diners, the curves and lines of the BQE, a nearby gospel house mysteriously called “The Love Chapel.” I got out and immediately saw hordes of Puerto Rican men burning trash on a street called Grandparent’s Avenue.

One of my new roommates, a lawyer from Texas who would promptly move out a week later, let me in. I think I had eight different roommates in the span of three months, including an Australian anarchist who I overheard having anal sex, a Chelsea gallerist on the rebound after a brutal breakup, and a flamboyant guy from Staten Island (who was obsessed with Madonna and his George Foreman grill). This all was temporarily mine – my intersection at Montrose and Bushwick, the $3 chicken with broccoli combo at the Chinese counter down the street. My mom made me promise that I wouldn’t walk around New York after sundown, so I took the L train nine stops to Union Square and went to the giant Forever 21, making sure that I got home before dark. Sitting in my new apartment with nothing but a takeout box, I was excited and terrified. After a long life of nothing, finally something was happening to me.

I remember that summer in flashes – my first boyfriend, a Southerner who chain smoked American Spirits and played Dory Previn songs on his ukulele. The time I did cartwheels with two Hispanic teenagers at the corner of Essex and Rivington.

Sneaking onto the roof of the Chelsea Hotel where I screamed out in surprise to see a naked man staring back at me. Blood gushing all over the sidewalk on 6th Avenue and dripping down my legs, not knowing it was because my hymen had broke. Seeing Sonic Youth play the entirety of Daydream Nation in McCarren Pool. Ryan Adams saying “hi” like he knew me. I wore a very unadvisable halter top/tube dress combination from American Apparel and came home 30 pounds lighter, my hair way too long and matted, with suspect bed bug sores on my arms and legs and unflossed teeth. I was absolutely heartbroken to leave. I had become my best self.

Me and the Southerner broke up, but I keep returning to New York. I have a confusing relationship to the city. I don’t have the same ambition coursing through my veins, a sense of self so big and entitled that I could smile back when a schizophrenic guy on the subway tells me I have “the face of a white woman and the body of a Dominican princess.” I am older now and battling depression. There are days when I can’t get out of bed so I watch my room go dark except the light of my phone’s LCD screen. The city has changed, too. The $700 rent I paid is laughable now. And sometimes it feels like the New York I knew in 2007 (a little scrappier and louder) is being absolutely ruined by artisanal jam makers and the kind of white people who are always having picnics. While many of my friends have gotten their extraordinary alien visa and moved there, I feel pulled in different directions. I know New York will always be the brass ring ambitious people reach for. But it’s tough to reconcile the past with my present self. I keep going back and expecting things to mean the same things they did when I first experienced them. But they can’t.

About a year ago, I went back to New York for the first time in three years with my mom in tow. A short film I wrote
premiered at the Manhattan Film Festival (fun fact – this festival is a scam!), so the director, my mom, and I drove down to see it. I was incredibly broke so my mom paid for everything – all my meals, distressed jeans, movie tickets, and iced lattes. In exchange, she asked me to introduce her to strangers as my publicist. We walked down the Highline together, drank at bars on the Lower East Side, ate a sandwich at Katz’s deli. She was (and is still) going through a divorce to my dad after 27 years. I was slowly breaking up (and am still) with my first serious boyfriend who I had made movies and lived with for a while. We were both a little broken and shaken up, a real gruesome two-some, which manifested itself in a strange act of rebellion.

“Sometimes it feels like the New York I knew in 2007 is being absolutely ruined by artisanal jam makers”

The last day before we left, I took my mom to Brooklyn. She’d never been, although she kept mentioning she’d gone through LaGuardia Airport before. My mom and I can be combative in our snobbery. Her approach is a real “been there, done that” and my rebuttal is a real “screw you, you don’t know what you’re talking about” – so much that we had a real blow out after she told me she was “over” Central Park. We either click or irrationally, blindly hate each other. It’s always been like that.

While we were walking through Williamsburg, I kept pointing out the places where I had gotten drunk and fell in love and once saw Peter Dinklage walking a humungous dog. I took her to Café Grumpy’s because my mom loves Girls. (She’s a Marnie.) On the way there, we walked past a small tattoo parlour on a leafy side street. She walked in and immediately pointed to a butterfly design that she wanted tattooed on her wrist. As our comely Midwestern tattoo artist started the stencil, I signed the consent form, which was funny. She seemed nervous so I said I would get one too. We’d be together on this, a united front.

I had about a minute to decide what I wanted, so I just told them to write NYC on my arm in tiny letters. Afterwards, my mom and I walked around Greenpoint with big bandages on our arms, so jacked full of adrenalin we kept talking about fighting someone. On the subway, a well-muscled Puerto Rican man asked if we had just gotten tattoos and when we said yes, he smiled and said, “God bless you!” We high fived him and for a moment, everything felt strange and beautiful and chaotic again.

I definitely feel a little stupid about this tattoo, especially when I’m in New York and a halal food cart guy side-eyes me like, “You’re a real New Yorker, huh?” But “NYC” also stands for New York Chandler. It’s sort of a tribute to the audacity I had and the ability to truly put myself out there. The kind of courageous person I’ll allow myself to be; suddenly introducing myself to Lynn Yaeger on the subway, or just exiting Penn Station and dragging my suitcase for 30 blocks because I’m just so happy to fucking be there. I keep thinking about the future and if I’ll ever get that $6,000 visa. Because how can you recapture a time that meant everything to you when you’re now a little cynical, sad and fucked up? But it’s still a part of me. My blood is on the sidewalk.